T
o set the scene: we have four artists from LUMS dismembered from their natural creative repositories, four walls closing in on them in a confrontation; outside, it is perhaps Lahore, Karachi, or Islamabad—the cities our artists hail from—but it doesn’t matter where we place them on the map. For them, it’s been the same still picture outside their window. What matters now is what they find within.
Our first artist, Mahnoor Lali ’23, has found a crossover between embroidery and painting, a realm that she devotionally weaves through at her own account by bringing in threads from her past “stitch by stitch” to “understand who and where [she] is now.” The process is laborious, repetitive, and begs days of patience. “But artists say trust the process, and I have to when I can’t see whether the tiny stitches are taking me to that big picture in mind.”
One such big picture hosts a brown woman whose space is invaded by a series of vines extending out to her and larger than life Monstera leaves obscuring her face. The bright red of the dress begs attention to serve an aesthetic value that stops before it can turn human—the accompanying account is a familiar rhyme of similar dehumanizing effects: “Das pattay toray… bhaiya ki dulhan kaali, so so nakhron wali.” Lali comments, “Where is the woman in all of that? Why is she so removed while this rosy narrative about a rishta is being created about her?”
“It just comes down to females claiming space in any way they can,” she notes about her autobiographical art. At the same time, she nods towards efforts around her that have brought a shift in women’s ownership of their lived experiences through movements like the Aurat March.